Psychological impact of experiences with COVID-19 pandemic considering disruption of global meaning and religious experiences

ABSTRACT

Previous literature has shown that single and multiple stressful and traumatic life events can lead to experiences of psychopathological symptoms. Upon experiencing these events, individuals have been found to engage in meaning making processes due to the violation of the experience with their global meaning (Bonanno et al., 2010;Park, 2010). Furthermore, global meaning violations (GMV) and spiritual struggles (SS) have been found to accompany posttraumatic stress and related symptoms (Appel et al., 2020). Presently, there is a lack of knowledge about the processes that lead to and could possibly exacerbate the psychological impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The current study investigated the relationships between experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning violations and spiritual struggles related to the pandemic, overall well-being, and psychopathologies. Participants (N = 202) were recruited from Amazon's MTurk to obtain a community sample of the general US population. Correlation analysis supported hypotheses stating a positive relationship between both global meaning violations and spiritual struggles and psychopathology symptoms. The structural equation model showed that GMV were directly related to psychopathology symptoms and SS. Meanwhile, COVID-19 exposure had an indirect effect on SS and psychopathology symptoms through GMV. Results have implications on the current understanding of individuals' psychological well-being and cognitive process during a global pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)